Subtle errors in a communication device may degrade its performance and reduce efficiency without completely shutting down any portion of the device. The causes of such errors can lie in many different device components. Ascertaining all the causes requires sophisticated test equipment and highly trained personnel. Communications problems can also be random and troublesome to reproduce.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a diagnostic system that would allow a diagnostician to stop a device so as to set its elements into a chosen state, in order to recreate an event that may be hard to capture during actual operation of the device.
Further, to prevent data loss and increase efficiency of the device, it would be desirable to restart the device from its disable state without a reset.
Moreover, to achieve flexibility during a diagnostic procedure, it would be desirable to provide a device that combines a freezing diagnostic mode for stopping operations of the device immediately, with a disable/enable diagnostic mode for stopping elements of the device in a serial fashion after their current operations are completed.